True Blood and queerness (spoilers through ep 2.09)
We finally watched last weekend's True Blood... and let me just say, I will watch Alexander Skarsgard's queer manpain Any Day.
A few comments about queer coding in this show... I'm sticking with it, but am starting to chafe at how many heterosexual romance plots we've seen portrayed as metaphors for queer romance narratives. Take Hoyt/Jessica--I find their subplot very charming! But her story in particular is rife with queer narratives. We saw her being rejected by her family, in religious terms that closely echo those leveled against gays. We saw her going through rebellious phases while seeking mentorship from her fangbanger (ie., queer) role model Sookie and her Maker (ie., the older man who initiates her into the life, more on this later) Bill. And now the flush of first love, of finding acceptance with Hoyt. Of meeting his mother, who is bitter and mean to her because she's corrupting her only son. Hoyt's mother cruelly ennumerates the things Hoyt is 'giving up' for this relationship--sunlight, being with a girl of good family, and most importantly, babies. In broader terms, the way the conservative religious institutions are nasty about vampires, their catchy little phrases ("God Hates Fangs on the church sign in the credits, for instance), not to mention the casual bigotry against vampires and revulsion at the idea of vampire/human relationships are clearly coded to rely on the social position of gays and lesbians in our society. I think Jessica's story is even more overtly appropriative of the queer narrative than Sookie/Bill is and was last season.
So, is this appropriation of queer narratives? Absolutely. And I think the replacement of queer people with man-eating monsters in these narratives should give us all pause, and if it weren't for Lafayette's character, the implications of this replacement would have been enough for me to stop watching after the first few episodes.
I can't help but bring to mind the Star Trek: TNG episode "The Outcast", which was their "gay issue" episode, clearly giving us a queer oppression storyline, but without any actual gay people (in this alien society, identifying as a gender-male or female-was illegal and got 'treated' by shock therapy. the covert romance is a heterosexual one between a female-identified alien and Riker). It's fairly obvious that TNG and True Blood both want to be sympathetic to LGBT people's narratives, but think it's going to be more palatable to a mainstream audience when adjusted to be heterosexual instead of homosexual. I think I see the reasoning there, but it's weak, and I think in the case of TNG for sure it was not particularly helpful.
I would say the same for True Blood if it weren't for Lafayette's character (!!), who I had some issues with in the first season but continue to like more and more. He's black, he's unabashedly gay and flamboyantly-garbed, but he never falls into being a stereotype (though he does occasionally use stereotypes to his own ends, which is kind of awesome). I also think that in recent episodes in particular, he's the character the show asks the audience to identify with. See the scene where he confronts Eggs and Tara for her bruises in Merlott's, and the crowd of customers laugh at him. His retort is to tell them to mind their own business and to call them a bunch of rednecks. The way that scene plays out, he comes out as seeming the most humane and sane character--his justified fear and anger for Tara's bruises gives us an emotional connection to him, and the onlookers are nothing more than callous assholes in response. I like what they've been doing with Lafayette--his PTSD moment in an earlier ep with Terry in the kitchen is one of the most unexpected and memorable scenes in the show so far. They're taking him to emotional places that they've shied away from with the main cast, and I'm hoping they continue that trend.
And then there's Eric. Eric... is the little black dress of this show. We've seen scenes in which his queerness is suggested by inference (the scene in an early ep this season when a shopgirl mistakes Eric and Bill for a gay couple) and by analogy: first, if drinking his blood makes it so Eric can feel her emotions and gives her erotic fixations, then the same should be true of Lafayette, who drank the "1000 year old healing elixir that is [Eric's] blood", and second, we've seen Bill and his Maker get up to all sorts of sexual and longterm intense romance themes... and Eric's Maker is Godric. We've also seen Godric elicit actual emotions from Eric, who's been an unbelievably cool customer up until these scenes. I know this sounds like a lot of fangirl speculation, and maybe it is, but I think the show kind of has to mean it, because of how Godric's death goes down. Weeping! Clinging! This was the episode where the subtext wails and weeps tears of blood and falls to its knees with love for the text. And then the text tells the subtext "there are centuries of faith and love between us." Seriously. If you want to see it, you can find it on youtube here.
Of course, we only got to have Godric for a couple of episodes... and if the subtext is really as gay as all that, it also comes laden with the knowledge that both characters are evil and have done evil things, and then one commits suicide. So... it's definitely not yet at a place where I'm happy about the depictions. Like, if Lafayette and Sookie have both drunk Eric's blood, then why didn't we see a dream sequence between Lafayette and Eric? In fact, why is the only overt gay sex we've seen all show one of prostitution (Lafayette sucking off Eddie the Vampire in exchange for his blood--a powerful drug). So far Eddie is the only character we've seen who's talked about being both gay and a vampire... and convincingly. Of course, he's dead, too. So.
I'm certainly enjoying it on a purely superficial level, and I'm coming to really like several of the characters, enough so that there are at least 4 on my favorites list. I'm not so head over heels for it that I can't see its flaws, though, too, though I will say it has surprised me with its quality.